Entries from January 2010

President Obama highlighted his proposed partial “freeze” on discretionary federal spending during his State of the Union address last week, which set off a flurry of predictable wrangling among Democratic and Republican members of Congress (for a pretty good summary of what’s going on, see Democrats, Republicans Spar Over Cutting Deficit). While talk of budget [...]

Jake wrote recently about the perils of being too creative as a grant writer in Never Think Outside the Box: Grant Writing is About Following the Recipe, not Creativity. This post elaborates on the invisible fence of “Convention Wisdom” (CW) that forces us grant writers to remain in the box. CW is an amorphous blob [...]

* Drop in Foundation Giving May Be Steeper than Anticipated. Those of you who want a piece of the action should read Isaac’s post PSST! Listen, Do You Want to Know a Secret? Do you Promise Not to Tell?* Here’s How to Write Foundation Proposals. * You’ve gotta love the convoluted program titles used by [...]

A New Yorker cartoon I like: If you write proposals, don’t be this cat. Any time you’re writing to an RFP—which, for grant writers, is virtually all the time—you’re required to respond to the RFP. If the RFP says, “give services to 300 participants per year,” you should say in your proposal that you’re going [...]